The night air in Solan carried the familiar chill of late autumn—that crisp Himalayan cold that seeps through even the warmest jackets. It was Diwali in 2018. Our small town had transformed into a constellation of flickering lights. Constant explosions of colour painted the sky in bursts of gold and crimson. I was 12, restless, and wandering alone through the park near my house. For reasons I couldn’t really articulate, I felt like I existed in the margins of my own life.
Private school had given me a certain vocabulary. A way of speaking and carrying myself that felt like armor. It protected me from the shame and judgement that is often heaped on those who are different. But any armor is heavy, and that night, I longed to shed it. I wanted to be just a boy in the dark, watching fireworks.
Then I saw him. He was with a friend, but I knew that he had seen me too. Both of them were laughing in that particular way boys do when they’re putting on an act for each other.
He went to the government school on the other side of town. The school’s grounds, which were open to the public in the evenings, was where we’d first met—and kept meeting. The differences in our upbringing were glaringly obvious. He was loud and unrestrained, while I had been trained in the art of polite containment. He often mocked me for being “soft,” “feminine”—the way I spoke, the careful way I dressed, my reluctance to participate in the casual brutality that seemed to define boyhood for so many.
That Diwali night, as I stood there watching the fireworks, it was clear that both of us were acutely aware of each other’s presence in the park though we had barely exchanged a glance. Eventually, his friend left—perhaps he was called home, or perhaps he grew bored of watching us circle each other like uncertain animals.
As soon as his friend was gone, I remember he walked towards me. And I didn’t walk away.
Becoming the Punchline
He started talking to me, and I surprised myself by responding. Not defensively, not with the careful distance I usually maintained with him, but with a kind of openness that felt dangerous and exhilarating. The conversation meandered through the usual topics—school, teachers we despised, the quality of fireworks this year.
Eventually, we landed, almost inevitably, on the subject of bodies. He claimed his penis was larger than mine. Instinctively, I argued back. We were both performing, trying to assert something neither of us fully understood. Adolescent boys, I’ve since realised, are obsessed with measurement precisely because they feel so unmeasured, so uncertain about where they fit in the world.
The argument continued for ten or fifteen minutes. Our voices rising and falling with the distant explosions of fireworks. Then he asked me to prove it.
“No,” I said. “You show yours first.”
He did.
And so, on that Diwali night in Solan, two boys from very different worlds stood in a dark corner of a park and measured themselves against each other. There was no ruler or measuring tape involved. It was his word against mine. He declared himself the winner. I let him.
We decided to head home just as the fireworks were reaching their crescendo. We walked out of the park together, carrying our flirtation disguised as competitive banter into the empty streets. As we got closer to our destinations, the proximity of home made everything feel both safer and more dangerous.
When we reached the narrow street where our routes diverged, something shifted in his expression. The bravado faded, replaced by something I couldn’t name. He asked me something that I wasn’t prepared for, a question that seemed to come from a place I didn’t know existed in either of us.
“Should we try something?”
I didn’t understand what he meant. Or perhaps I understood perfectly and simply lacked the language to admit it. I said yes before I could stop myself, before my private school training in self-control could intervene.
He grabbed me from behind, his arms wrapping around me in a way that felt both foreign and strangely familiar. He started kissing me. I was awkward and uncertain. My body was responding to sensations I had never experienced while my mind struggled to catch up. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. There was a confidence in his movements that spoke of practice.
For me, the experience was defined by discovery—not just of him and his body, but of myself, of the possibilities that existed within my body, which I had only begun to understand.
Then an old man stumbled onto the street, reeking of alcohol and muttering to himself. We broke apart immediately, our spell shattered. We ran in opposite directions as if our lives depended on it. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. I was too busy trying to process what had just happened, too overwhelmed by the realisation that everything I thought I knew about myself had suddenly become complicated.
That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. The din of the fireworks outside had died down. I replayed the moment over and over, trying to understand what it meant. I had always assumed I knew who I was. That night, I discovered I didn’t.
I couldn’t name what I was feeling. I had no vocabulary for it. The sex education I had received in private school had been clinical, technical, designed to explain biology without addressing desire. The word “gay” existed in my vocabulary, but only as a punchline—as something boys hurled at each other during arguments. It had never occurred to me that it might apply to me, that the label might not be an insult but a description, a way of understanding something fundamental about who I was.
Learning to Hide
My mother sent me to get groceries the next morning. It was a simple errand. But as I walked down the familiar street, I saw him standing with one of his friends. He was smiling, not the warm smile of shared intimacy, but something else, something that made my stomach drop.
And then he spoke.
“Rahul is a gay,” he announced, loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. “Rahul is a meetha.”
Meetha. Sweet. Slang for something considered shameful, something that should be hidden, something that deserved mockery. He was laughing now, and so was his friend. I stood there trying to figure out how the boy who had kissed me just hours ago could now be using that kiss as a weapon.
I argued back. I said I wasn’t, that he was lying, that I didn’t know what he was talking about. There was no point in defending myself, because the label wasn’t the problem. The problem was the judgment attached to it, the assumption that being called gay was something to deny.
What stayed with me wasn’t the label itself, but the betrayal. Here was the boy who had shared an intimate moment with me, who had initiated that moment, who had known exactly what he was doing and now he was publicly distancing himself from it by making me the punchline. He was performing heterosexuality by sacrificing me, turning our shared secret into a weapon he could use to protect himself.
This is the mathematics of shame: one person can avoid it by heaping it onto another. I became the container for everything he couldn’t admit about himself, the repository for the desires he couldn’t acknowledge. In calling me gay, he was saying: That’s not me. That’s him. I’m normal. He’s the one who’s different.
I didn’t have the language to articulate what had happened or why it made me feel so broken.
But the story doesn’t end there. Over the following months, a pattern emerged. He would seek me out when we were alone, returning to that same intimacy, that same desperate hunger for connection. He would kiss me again, hold me again, whisper things that made my heart race. “You’re mine, I need you,” he would tell me. I felt special.
Then, in public, he would mock me again, call me names again, perform the role of the ‘normal’ boy who was disgusted by the very things he craved.
I let him. That’s the part I find hardest to admit. I let him come back, again and again, because I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t know how to find what he offered me anywhere else. I didn’t know how to name it, how to ask for it, how to find someone who wouldn’t use it against me.
When I confronted him about it, he deflected with denial or anger. Sometimes, he begged me to understand. He had no choice, he told me, he had to mock me to protect himself.
So I accepted the cycle: the private intimacy, the public humiliation. I learned to hide my desires, to compartmentalise, to exist in two different versions of myself. The boy who kissed another boy in secret, and the boy who denied it when the same kiss was used to ridicule him in public.
Looking back, I understand that neither of us had the language to process what we were experiencing. We were children. Both of us were caught in the crossfire between biology and culture,, between desire and shame. I had been raised in a world that taught me to control my emotions, to present a polished surface to the world, to never reveal too much of myself. He had been raised in a world that taught him to perform masculinity aggressively, to dominate and mock, to never show vulnerability.
Neither of us had been given the tools to understand what was happening between us. Neither of us had been told that it was possible to desire someone of the same sex without being broken, without being shameful, without being less than.
Beyond Labels
Two years after that Diwali night, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, distance. My family moved away from Solan, leaving behind the streets where I had discovered myself and the boy who had both shown me pleasure and used it against me. There was no closure, no final conversation, no resolution. Just the slow fade of a connection that had always been defined by its instability.
Distance gave me perspective. Without the constant proximity to him, without the cycle of intimacy and betrayal, I began to see the whole experience differently. fo
I realised that that night in Solan was not a story of corruption or guilt. It was the story of two children trying to understand themselves, trying to find connection in a world that offered them none. The boy who called me gay was not my enemy. He was my mirror, showing me the fears I couldn’t admit to having, the desires I couldn’t acknowledge.
Being gay is not something to defend against. It’s not something to argue about. It’s simply a fact, a way of describing who I am and who I love. There is nothing shameful about it, nothing that requires apology or denial. My vehement denials the morning after that Diwali night—”I’m not gay, I’m not, I’m not”—were rooted in fear, in the belief that being gay was something terrible, something to be avoided at all costs.
I know better now.
This is how homophobia works. It doesn’t just attack us from the outside; it teaches us to attack each other, to police ourselves and each other, to enforce the rules of desire that police society deems acceptable. The most insidious violence is the violence we do to each other in the name of survival.
Reclaiming the Boy He Named
Looking back, I no longer remember him as the person who gave me a label. Instead, I remember him as the first person who showed me that desire and shame often arrive together, and that growing up queer sometimes means spending years separating one from the other.
Ultimately, this is a story about reclaiming an experience that once made me hide—and transforming it into a memory that allows me to be seen.
What he did wasn’t okay. But I have forgiven him because I understand the forces that shaped him. He did what he had to do to survive, and I was the collateral damage.
But forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean erasing the pain or pretending it didn’t happen. It means holding it differently, seeing it as part of a larger story, recognizing that we are all caught in systems bigger than ourselves.
The boy he named was always there. The label didn’t create me; it only gave me a word for what I already was. And what I am, what we all are, is more complicated than any label can capture. We are not just gay or straight, masculine or feminine, normal or different. We are human beings, trying to love and be loved in a world that often makes it difficult.
I am grateful for that boy. Not for the cruelty, but for the moment of connection that preceded it. Not for the label, but for the experience that made me need to find a label at all. He showed me something that no one else had shown me, and for that, I will always be in his debt.
The boy who called me gay gave me a gift, though he didn’t know it. He gave me myself.